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After two months as a camera operator in the UN General Assembly hall in Geneva…
A tall slender woman was sitting on a chair by the podium where her husband was delivering a presentation to a hall filled with people. Each group of four people had a white board in front and on this board was the name of the deleguation. Canada, USA, France, Lithuania and more. In the balconies NGO names could be spotted. The location is the general assembly hall in Geneva and the occasion is Abdullah Il bin an Hussein the second of Jordan speaking to all these deleguations. I was the cut away camera and I was told to focus on cut away shots.
This took place on my second year of working for the International Labour Conference, general meeting of the International Labour Organisation. My job during this time was to cover the plenary sessions. Whenever a deleguation requested for their presentation to covered I had to be there and record it, either on VHS or Beta, depending on what the client wanted.
When the ILC began you would always find every seat was filled but as breakout sessions took place so the general assembly hall would empty. You would find only three or four deleguations at a time and quite often you would spot them leaning back in their chair with a beige object over one of their ears. This was the simultaneous translation. Quite often the deleguate would have both eyes closed. Was he sleeping or focusing on what was being said. I’m not sure.
You can see diplomacy in action in such halls. Occasionally there would be an important person speaking and many other deleguations would come and listen. Once the speaker finished talking everyone would get out of their seat and go and congratulate them on their great oratory and the things they had brought up. Some of these speakers did deserve the praise but most of the time they speak in droning monotonous voices, hence the closed eyes I described earlier.
Occasionaly I would get something fun to do like press conferences. There are two press conference rooms where i might have gone. Room 1 and 4. Room 1 is an informal room with tables and the personality would speak at the head. Each of these rooms had a breakout box so that placing a microphone was not necessary. Room 4 is one you have seen many times in news items from Geneva. That’s the room with the blue UN logo repeated over and over again. Above is a mural. The drawback to working at the UN is the long corridors you walk down to get from place to place. When you’ve got a camera, two batteries, a tripod and two or three tapes you’re lugging quite a bit of wheight. Add the summer heat and you see why it’s not to everyone’s liking. Personally i miss it.
Once the press conferences were over I’d head back to the general assembly hall and sit through ten more plenary speeches. Occasionaly i would take the camera and the tripod and walk around the room getting cut away shots. That’s quite fun. You look at people and you see what they’re doing. You isolate people. You see a person writing something down, you get a shot of that, someone else yawning you get that. If someone is focusing on the speaker you get that. In certain cases you get shots of the deleguate and the board saying which country they represent. Other times you’d get a behind the shoulder shot looking up at the speaker.
There are some press conferences that are emotional than others. I remember taking one of the nicer cameras and recording a press conference about slavery. During that event some experts talked about the situation in certain countries before getting to the special guest. One of these guests started to talk and described her ordeal, how she had left her country of origin only to end up as a slave in a western country and how she was never allowed to leave. Hearing someone speak about this and not having a television screen or monitor to separate you from their reality has a powerful effect. Such occasions take certain things from being abstract to reality.
When I went to Tanzania I was one year away from completing the IB and I saw such a different way of life that I wanted to stay there. I was impressed by the improvisation and happiness of those children. I also liked having to walk for fourty minutes through banana plantations and fields to get from one place to another and experience their culture, at least fleetingly. If there’s anyone reading this that needs to cover the humanitarian work that they are doing to bring awareness to their work then let me know and I’d love to be part of those expeditions.
The World from a baby’s perspective
How would you feel if you had access to video footage taken with a 360° camera of the world from a baby’s perspective? This is a question I find interesting to answer. I decided to try this experiment a few days ago. The limitation of most cameras is that they only show what is within the field of view. They only show what the photographer or camera operator felt was worth capturing.
With a 360° camera placed at the child’s eye level you can see everything from their perspective. You can see the entire room and you can look up to see the grown ups or down to see the hands and other objects on the ground. You can also see the underside of chairs and tables. With VR goggles you would see the world from that perspective.
Imagine a birthday or Christmas party from this perspective. You would see the opening of presents, the reaction of the infant but also of the grown ups, of the brothers and sisters and maybe pets if there are any around.
I think that this way of documenting the world would be most interesting for the child when she becomes a teenager or grown up. Imagine the pleasure that could be had by seeing how everyone looked at this time. Conventional cameras are always missing at least one person. With 360 cameras everyone would be in the image. The camera operator becomes part of the scene.
One advantage of 360° videos is that they cover what is taking place in front and behind the camera so people may behave more naturally than if a standard video or photo camera was pointing at them. I love being behind video cameras rather than in front. With 360 cameras I am forced to be in frame. I believe that people will behave in a more natural manner than if they were filmed by a conventional camera.
We see how people enjoy letters and paintings, photographs and conventional videos. Imagine how much enjoyment people would get from taking a step back in time. Imagine looking at the furniture, the gadgets, the architecture from a decade or two ago.
Documentaries about JavaScript Frameworks
Within the last week Honeypot Originals have released a number of documentaries. Each episode covers a different JavaScript Framework. So far that have Vue.js, Ember.js, Elixir and GraphQL. Each of these documentaries is about half an hour long and interviews some of the key players. What is nice about these documentaries is that they take names and projects that may be familiar to us, but add faces and context to them. I have heard about some of these people via podcasts and more. With these videos I get to listen to them, and watch them explain the importance of their projects.
Vue.js: The documentary from Vue.js: The Documentary by Honeypot Originals
After watching these videos you may get a better understanding of why you would, or would not want to study a specific language. It takes a project from just being a name in the title of a video to something less abstract.
The video about Vue.js cleared some of my hesitancy about studying the framework. Hearing about how the Laravel and other communities grew to be interested in the framework is interesting. It seems like a worthwhile alternative to React and Angular, the two giants in the space.
When I watched the video about GraphQL I didn’t really get the answer about why I should choose it over JSON. So far the answer seems to be “because it only returns the data you want to use. I will need to spend time trying to understand what its key selling point is.
I wanted to take a break from the usual studying habit today, to have a rest day whilst still moving forward.
I am now fourty percent through a Udemy Course to master javascript and I am struggling more, now, than before. It isn’t easy to master such a complex subject. I should practice more, from outside of the course. I thought strings would be simple but there are details that I need to explore further.
That’s it for today.
Negotiating Overhangs
Negotiating overhangs is physical, fun and sometimes scary. It is for this reason that the Via Ferrata de Thônes via ferrata section is such fun. It gets your adrenaline pumping as you fight to keep hold and clip and unclip in the relevant sections. It forces you to overcome your fear of being over the void. The third section of the Via Ferrata de Saillon is a challenge for the very same reason.
The video above shows rock climbers at the IFSC World cup negotiating an overhanging wall and trying various techniques to get further than other people. We see how they use heel hooks and go for it before losing their grip and falling. This footage is fun because we see them work to solve the problem in a number of ways and then fall. When they fall the belayer slows down but does not stop the fall so it looks as if they are falling towards the ground. Imagine an ordinary person getting that sensation. It would scare them.
Fear is good because it keeps us safe. It means that we’re thinking of the consequences and we are aware of the dangers. It means that we will only progress within our comfort level. If we have doubt we can climb down to the nearest quick draw and rest. If we ignore that fear then we may fall. By staying in our comfort zone we are safer.
When you’re climbing you know when you have good foot holds and hand holds. You also know how long you will be able to stay in that position. The more afraid you are the more energy you burn. That’s why positioning is important. In the video above we see that one person decided to climb feet first through the overhanging section. Our leg and feet muscles are much stronger than our arm muscles so they allow us more time to think of a solution. With time all of these climbers could have negotiated that section.